Don’t Call Them Millennials.
AMEX Company Presentation, 2018
I’m that guy that really like understanding people. I like to know why someone wears adidas instead of Nike, why they eat poke over acai bowls, whether they drink whiskey at night or run laps at dawn, when and how they spend their money.
I’m also a curious person. I always want to know why things are popular, or niche, or blowing up right at a particular moment. I ask questions all the time. When we go to the pub, my friends always feel like they’re being interviewed. This helps because among other things, I’ve been a music journalist since I was 18.
I still remember my very first question in my very first interview, with You Am I. Here’s what I asked Tim Rogers: ‘With the rise of retro bands like Jet and Wolfmother, do you feel like there’s a trend back toward long sideburns?’
He ripped up my questions. And stuck them to my sideburns. I think it went well.
In my quest to know more about people, especially young people, because I am a 30 year old who dresses like a 15 year old, I’ve managed to hold down a lot of different careers at the same time. Right now I work as a copywriter at an ad agency, a journalist, a producer and a consultant. I’m a weird one to hire because nobody quite knows what to call me or do with me.
It’s fitting then, that we’re here to talk about trends with millennials, another group of people that literally nobody knows anything about. No, I’m serious. Not even millennials know anything about millennials. It’s all happening too fast.
Today’s theme is ‘Stop Making Sense.’ I think it’s apt.
The only way to get on board with young people, to try and understand even a sliver of what they’re about, is to stop trying to make sense. Because let’s face it, we live in a world that increasingly makes no sense, and we’re charging these irony-free, Instagram bards with the future of it.
May God help us all.
Understanding that you’ll never really properly understand youth culture is super liberating. It allows you to focus on what matters, to hone in and target an insight based on an actual truth, rather than what some kid told you because you gave him and his mates pizza on a Monday to answer 100 questions.
Before I get into some of the trends I’ve picked up on that will definitely be irrelevant by the time you leave this place, I think it’s important we have a chat about the word millennials. I hate it. It’s the worst. You know who else hates it? Millennials. You’ll never hear them call themselves that, not like your bosses like to boast about how they’re Gen Xers.
Young people. That’s who we’re talking about. And if you’re like me, you’re probably starting to feel like our generation has split in half. Technically, if you’re born after 1985, you’re the same generation as my sister, who’s 20. I have a theory that there’s a fault line between our generations, and it sits around the 1997. You can call it pre or post-Spice Girls. Or pre or post-MSN Messenger. My sister doesn’t remember life without an iPod, a mobile phone or super fast Internet. We have completely different lived experiences but we’re supposedly the same generation. It’s crazy.
So personally, when I talk about millennials, or young people, I usually talk about the group on the other side of that fault line. Sure, we still have things in common, but our differences grow every day. I’m starting to feel like I have more in touch with my parents than I do with the bottom half of my own demographic, and I’m not even that old.
The other day, we had a work experience girl come into our office and I was charged with giving her something to do. I thought it would be fun to get a teenager born in 2001 to read through a bunch of presentations written about her own demographic by publications like Lifelounge, VICE, Junkee and Pedestrian. Millenial reads millennial decks. Could be a good content series.
These were companies trying to package up and sell young people to brands like you. I’d know all about that, I’ve worked for all of them. It was imperative to them to at least pretend to know what young people wanted. Which is understandable, given that I’m sure you all know that as we come of age, our generation will spend more, make more and eventually swallow the Boomers whole.
Stop Making Sense.
Because I’m a music geek, I got a discount pass into youth culture. More than at any other time in history, it pays to stay young in the music industry. We have multi-platinum teenage stars emerging from their bedrooms faster than their parents can make them. I’m going to use quite a few music examples today, because I really believe it’s the nexus of many aspects of what kids love and hate. It’s worked for me for the last decade, so hey, why stop now?
Stop Making Sense doesn’t just apply to us. It applies to the kids we’re talking to, too. They’re coming of age in a world that has not been this totally messed up since World War II. Every day is a complete mystery; who is going to tweet what, nuke whom, invoke ISIS where, out that Hollywood exec for exposing himself to how many women. Things as we knew it are disintegrating, but for the new millennials, it’s all they’ve ever known.
I think we can trace our big themes back to this concept of non-sense. Today we’re going to talk about the resurgence of Australiana. New substitutes for religion. The breakdown of genres. Radical transparency and the rise of activism. Ways of making sense of a country, and a planet, that doesn’t really have much left. Let’s dig a bit deeper.
Let’s talk about Australiana.
I grew up in the ’90s. In the ’90s, being Australian was not cool. We all wanted to be American, or British. We wanted to skate like Tony Hawk, play in bands like Red Hot Chili Peppers, rock cargo pants and crop tops like All Saints and S Club 7.
We had the odd local hit here and there; Powderfinger, Heartbreak High, Looking for Alibrandi. But the majority of our stars and personalities sounded or tried to become foreigners. Silverchair, the Nirvana from Newcastle. That sort of thing. We wanted to be cool, not daggy. Australia was the end of the Earth, and all most of us with a Napster account were dreaming of was escape.
Fast-forward to today. It has never been cooler to be Australian. And not just Australian, but daggy, 1980s, unsightly colours and harsh-accented Australian. I’m sure you’ve noticed this. R.M. Williams boots are everywhere. Client Liaison, who spruik Fosters and shot a film clip on an Ansett plane, are festival headliners. Courtney Barnett, literally the most ocker sounding girl on Earth, has broken America. Paul Kelly won two ARIAs. The ibis is water cooler conversation again. Everyone really wants Warney back.
An entire subculture has popped up around this phenomenon, and it’s become currency for young people more than the rest of us. We chuckle about it ironically, they drink VB out of shoes. They go out dressed like our Dads did when they used to pick us up from soccer practice on a Sunday. It’s this sort of mish-mash between reverse bogan and ironic playfulness that seems to have come from nowhere. Genuinely, it doesn’t make much sense.
That drills down right to a local level. When I was at uni, kids from the country or regional areas used to lie about where they were from, and try and disguise the thickness of their accent. Not anymore. Now we’ve got Nina Las Vegas repping Wagga, the Betoota Advocate from Far North Queensland, Vera Blue from Forbes. By the numbers, Groovin’ The Moo is the biggest festival in the country. It’s never been cooler to be a salt-of-the-Earth Australian.
What’s making us embrace our Australian-ness again? What happened to cultural cringe? One theory might be that the countries we used to look up to aren’t really providing great role models at the moment. America’s about to start a proper nuclear war thanks to a President none of us can believe is actually still in office. The UK is splintering the EU to bits and Oasis still haven’t gotten back together. There’s a refugee crisis, climate change, bloody Bitcoin. It’s scary out there.
In light of all this and even given many of our own grave issues, suddenly Australia seems a whole lot more attractive. So we amp up the qualities we’ve always had. We have a laugh. We embrace our backwards country brethren, our crocodiles and kangaroos. We still have a healthy dose of sarcasm. Tall poppy syndrome is stronger than ever. We fall back in love with ironically hating ourselves but actually, deep down, really loving our country.
Injecting yourself with strong ocker culture, even if you grew up in Mosman, is important given how much this generation travel. It’s literally what they spend about half of their money on, and it gives them a bond with other self-reflexive dags wearing Sydney Olympics 2000 sweaters in Berlin or at Coachella. But it also gives them a sense of identity, even though it’s a strange rehash of one that we all tried to avoid 25 years ago.
Identity is important to kids.
When you think about today’s teenagers think about how different their identity politics are to yours. Many of you probably went to a denominational school. Perhaps your parents were religious. Your grandparents belonged to a Church, a local mosque, or a synagogue. According to the last census, more Australians identify as ‘no religion’ than ever. Now, we all know it wasn’t the best census on record, but it’s interesting nonetheless. If today’s kids are growing up in houses where religion is less prominent, or perhaps are making that decision for themselves earlier, that has a big impact on how they try to make sense of the world.
It’s somewhat true that today’s youth are increasingly fragmented. What’s interesting, and it’s something Alain de Botton, one of my favourite writers touched on in his book Religion for Atheists, is that an absence of religion leads people to form new tribes. We still need to be connected, even if it isn’t a big guy up in the clouds or Sundays at the Greek Orthodox service keeping us together.
But living vicariously through the endless scroll rather of your phone rather than a Torah scroll can have very real impacts on your levels of alienation and belonging. So millennials have taken it upon themselves to create new tribes, new religions, and in some cases, stand-ins for God.
This year, nutrition is a religion. F45 is a religion. Mental health is a religion. We are forming associations based on things we used keep to ourselves; issues with our guts, our flab, our minds.
I will wager that almost everyone in this room is a follower of one of these new faiths. Maybe you worship some toned nutritionist on Instagram. Perhaps you’re a member of a new fraternity of crossfit fanatics. I’ve been observing in quite a few of these new religions lately, and the funny thing is that they kind of function like traditional ones, except they started yesterday and not thousands of years ago.
Young kids are finding new colonies of meaning. The most surprising of these has been around mental health.
A few years ago, I wandered down to check out a new group I’d heard about, on Instagram of all places. It was called One Wave Is All It Takes. Its founder, Grant, stood up in the first session I went to, which was kind of like Church mixed with AA, and told everyone about his own struggles with bipolar. He encouraged everyone to open up about their mental health, and use fluoro colours and surfing as a way of managing it. It was wild. I’ve been a card-carrying member ever since.
One Wave has now spread across Australia and the world. It’s essentially the Crusades of feel good. There’s a new Jesus, fluoro-coloured minions, weekly Confession, a set of psalms like ‘Free The Funk’. From seemingly nowhere, an entire global community has come together, and almost all of them are super young.
Grant’s got a mate called Stefan. You might have heard of him too, he’s another surfer with too many ideas that makes people like me look bad. Last year, Stefan ran a festival called We’re All Going To Die. It was sold out. That’s 2000 kids who came out on a Friday night to rally around their anxieties and to discuss how death can inspire us to live. Some psychologists ran a session called Death Meditation. The line to get in was longer than a when Kanye West launched his clothing range in Sydney.
If religion has stopped making sense to this generation, it should come as little surprise that they’ve started to create their own. All influencers are, really, are the self-appointed priests of their new brand of religion. We’ve recalibrated our faith around common, previously taboo interests, and they feel more real to us than any stuffy old Priest.
Were you a rock and roll kid growing up ? I was. They don’t exist anymore.
You know what really doesn’t make sense? Today’s pop charts. Music is all over the place. Hip-hop is stealing cues from rock music, R&B and electronic are the same thing, folk singers are writing for Beyonce, rappers are coming out as bisexual. It’s a total mess. Add the complete breakdown of the album and singles sales model and throw in play listing and suddenly you’ve got an entire generation that refuses to identify with what has essentially been the strongest indicator of youth culture for over 50 years.
In the grand hierarchy of what kids like, music has firmly pushed film off the map. Right now, there’s some disaffected kid that looks like Bilie Eilish with a laptop who is simultaneously launching a fashion line, a hashtag and a web series and she has assembled an army of Internet followers around him.
Maybe he or she is like Lil Peep, who looks like a punk, wrote a new brand of emo and rap and died a few months ago like a pop icon, allegedly overdosing on the same drug as Prince. You probably never heard of Lil Peep. I know I hadn’t until he passed away. He was nowhere near radio, got zero mainstream media coverage. But playlisting and Soundcloud made him a huge star who sold out shows weeks in advance. He was part of a new guard of kids that speak to their fans directly.
The a la carte, anything-goes way kids are consuming music now is an incredibly important for brands. They trust their own feelings, and they’re not waiting for a record label or a radio station to give them a lesson in authenticity. They take what they like, and most of them follow playlists rather than artists themselves. Loyalty is not a given.
Think about the last piece of communication your agency created for you using talent. Perhaps it was a TV star, or a musician, or an influencer. You decided to go with them because of their stock, their track record. But here’s the thing. You can’t assume things will make sense. Past performance is no longer the indicator it once was of future success. My de facto intern summed it up best; ‘I don’t care who it is,’ she said as I asked her about different artists. ‘I just care that it’s got a good beat.’
No genre, no tribes. And no fixed rules, either. A$AP Rocky somehow models for Dior, sells Mercedes Benz A Class while simultaneously being a rapper who loves narcotics. Tyler, The Creator has three capsule collaborations with Converse, his own sold-out fashion label, a TV show on VICE and is banned from the UK and New Zealand for being homophobic while having just received a Grammy nomination for a record in which he announced he was gay.
It is foolish to try and keep up with the pace of this new guard. But as marketers, we can learn from their anarchic approach to creativity. Think about what’s good, not about what’s hot. Because by the time any of us get there, we’ll be lucky if it’s even lukewarm.
For the first time since Jesus walked on water, it’s not a great year to be a powerful white male.
If you want to get what young kids are about, you should probably know that the slow breakdown of power structures that we’re currently seeing everywhere from Kevin Spacey to the Paradise Papers is already happening in their culture at about 50 times that speed.
Make no mistake, this is not going away. If anything, 2018 will see this radical transparency move from entertainment and into the commercial sector; marketing, advertising, finance.
Kids have always called bullshit on brands and institutions, but it used to be based on gut feel. Now they have access to information, private conversation, leaks, the President’s twitter account. It’s open season. The age of accountability is truly upon us, and while it seems like the world has gone mad, it makes a lot of sense to millennials, who have been raised to know that nothing sacred and nothing is permanent.
Just look at how many times Bieber has restarted his career.
What has changed is the expectation. Now that the rest of us have caught up to this brave new world, there is literally no situation in which you as a company are allowed to lie to them. If you try and dupe them, even if you succeed, you’ll ultimately fail. The kids will get you, and it will be swift and merciless.
It’s the whole truth and nothing but the truth, so help you God.
This is probably the one trend that is only going to magnify over the next decade. It’s pretty much the only sure bet when it comes to marketing to young kids; be real with them. The only word as overused as ‘millennial’ is ‘authentic’ but it’s valid. Don’t worry about telling authentic brand stories, worry about being authentic.
Some brands, like yours, actually have a very strong track record when it comes to standing for what it believes in, whether it’s small business, the Statue of Liberty or the environment. But the general marketplace isn’t so blessed. Disingenuous, cause based advertising is an easy trap to fall into, especially when what you’re selling isn’t sexy and comes with heaps of terms and conditions.
You know, like a credit card.
Let’s take Marriage Equality as an example. It would be hard to find a brand that didn’t come bursting out of the gates demanding equal rights for gay couples last year. But many of them were just using it as an excuse to be part of the conversation. They invested zero money in initiatives and essentially sought to better their standing by latching onto something trendy. It didn’t take the kids long to realise who was really walking the walk.
I like to say that rainbows are trendy for marketers in 2017, like women’s issues were in 2016 and diversity was in 2015. Piggybacking a cause has never been more dangerous than it is right now.
[Post-script: Toxic Masculinity will definitely be this for 2019]
I have a friend who is a pretty Indian girl who runs a hip-hop class. She was getting approached so many times by brands to tick their diversity box, that she got all her brown, queer and ethnic friends and started a talent agency. She probably makes more money a year than I do. That’s the climate we’re in.
100 years of history, 50 Oscar nominations, 2 billion dollars. It doesn’t matter anymore. What used to make sense, the rules we abided by are disappearing. But this means you can create new ones, and take your new customers with you. Let’s be real. The old ones are probably pervs anyway.
So what’s the link between a world that makes no sense and powerful people being held to account? Activism.
You probably remember media types going on about ‘slacktivism’ over the past few years. Kids voting with their thumbs, making pointless noise on social media instead of getting out there and pounding the pavement like their folks did.
Slacktivism is a harsh burn for a millennial. It cuts deep. We complain about how things are messed up, but we don’t do anything about it. But here’s something curious, something snapped at the end of last year. We stopped giving thumbs up and starting rising up. Women’s Marches. Manus. Marriage Equality. Proudly Pokies Free. Keep Sydney Open. Taking a knee. Chaining ourselves to trees threatened by the Wesconnex.
A lot of it hasn’t come to pass, but young kids are starting to realise that not trying is no excuse. And there have been more gains made this year, mostly initiated by us, than the last five. Marriage Equality is going to pass. Triple J is changing the date of the Hottest 100. CBA is pulling out of Adani.
Expect more of this. Now that we’re starting to realise Facebook is as responsible for Trump as we are, people are going back to brass tacks. They’re making signs, attending rallies, spray-painting murals of Tony Abbott and Cardinal Pell.
Somewhere along the line, Boomers forgot that every new generation was born to cause trouble. This has been happening since the birth of the teenager. Perhaps they thought we’d get so distracted by our phones that we’d forget about the housing crisis, refugees, crooked politicians and lockout laws. They were wrong.
I’ve done a lot of work with Keep Sydney Open, which is a pretty good example of this idea in principle. KSO started as a Facebook group that nobody believed would go anywhere and ended up with two rallies that brought 20,000 people out to the street. The message made it into both houses of Parliament, the ARIAs and across the entertainment news worldwide. We eventually helped usher the Premier Mike Baird into a new job at NAB and it’s now on the verge of becoming its own party. Laws are slowly starting to change. And that’s largely down to our generation kicking things down and starting again.
Stop Making Sense.
For the next generation, our generation split in two, the world is at once a liberating, confusing and completely lawless place. It explains why they’re starting to cling to a classic idea of what it means to be Australian, to refashion it for themselves. It explains why they’re gravitating back towards new ideas of religion even as they give it up in record numbers. Why they’re opting for the the sound they want, rather than the what we all grew up thinking we needed. Why it’s so much harder to earn their trust and how they hold everyone to account. And finally, why they’re bucking the trend and getting out there and doing something about their political situation.
For young kids, each year changes exponentially from the year before. Trends are subdividing infinitely.
All you can do is ask questions and take the time to listen to the answers.
© Jonno Seidler, 2018. All rights reserved.
